Master Closet Makeover

Published August 24, 2016 By
raquelkz

The master closet makeover is my biggest (and hardest) project to date. My lovely husband is so talented, but some talents he prefers not to use. It took a lot of convincing to get him on board, but even without experience he rocked it. 3 weeks of design planning, 2 weeks of building, and 2 months of long nights painting paid off. It’s now my little piece of paradise.

The first time I laid eyes on this closet during our house tour it whispered make me pretty. While I totally disagree with the proportion of this closet (relative to
the square footage of our home) due to its location there was no easy way to reconfigure or utilize it differently. So instead we maximized its closet potential by giving it a total overhaul. I breakdown everything below so keep reading!

1st Step: The Blue Print

I’m embarrassed to share my awful handwriting, but this is where is where it all started. I”m not much of an artist, so I understand if you can’t make any sense of this blueprint. Essentially the first step was measuring the walls, coming up with a design plan, and making a list (and budget) of all needed supplies. I compiled this all on the paper you see above and it helped keep things straight.

The design plan was tricky (especially the closet corners). I avidly searched Pinterest for ideas and assistance from other bloggers. See My Closet Pinterest Board here. I ended up combining my favorite things from multiple closets I loved. I went with the cubby built in look, angled shoe shelves, and functional open corners, all painted to match in bright white.

***Important Closet Numbers to Keep in Mind***

A clothes closet should have a minimum depth of at least 24 inches deep, so the clothes can clear the back wall.

Shelves for women’s shoes should be spaced about 6 to 7 inches apart.

Shelves for folded clothes should be placed around 12 inches apart.

84 inches is considered the minimum height to hold double hanging rods.

Blouses and shirts will take up about 1 inch of rod space, pants and skirts around 1 1/4 inches and dresses, jackets and suits about 2 to 3 inches.

I found these numbers were very generous, and when I took a few inches off it still worked out fine.

This is the list of tools and supplies that emerged after my design plan:

-Drill
-Basic Wood Table saw
-200 long screws
-Finishing nails and hammer
-8 Floor to ceiling (8ft long) pieces of wood to make cubby frames
-Other various pieces of wood cut to size for shelves.
-2 IKEA Malm 3-4 drawer dressers to work like built ins.
-Hardware for the IKEA Dressers
-30 ft of 5-6inch crown mounding to go across the top of cubbies.
-30 feet of Baseboard to match since it would run in with the existing baseboard. -16 (8 ft pieces) of MDF “Thickening Edge”, to give it a clean streamlined look.
-6 Brushed Nickel adjustable closet rods
-2 Gallons of primer
-2 Gallons of white paint
-Wood Putty to fill in screw holes
-Caulk and caulk gun to use on all meeting edges, baseboard, and crown mounding.

Our budget was $1000, but we actually came almost $100 under due to some amazing craigslist finds. Also keep in mind the only thing we had was a drill, every other tool we bought came out of the budget. As soon as I had my list I began pricing things out and checking classifieds. I was able to get both IKEA Dressers for $40 each, beautiful crown molding total for $25, and we got a lot of wood from a craftsman for a decent deal. The rest of the items were purchased at our local Home Depot and Lowes.

2nd Step: DEMO

Danny surprised me with Demo so I didn’t get a great before picture, but here is the after demo pictures:

After demoing the shelf, we sanded and mudded everywhere the previous shelf had existed.

Step 3: Building Cubbies

Step 4: Adding Thickening/Finishing Edge

We used liquid nails to add this MDF edge! It worked great!

Step 5: Adding Baseboard and Crown Molding

Crown molding was nailed to studs in the ceiling. It gave the cubbies a finished look.

Baseboard came together at a 90 degrees (we didn’t have the right saw to do angled cuts), but after caulking it was unnoticeable.

We ran the baseboard from the cubbies directly into the existing wall baseboard. Don’t mind my messy caulking, it had a good clean up since this pic.

Step 6: Painting

This most time consuming step is what really gave the closet it’s WOW factor! I used a bright white and between prime and paint it took about 4 gallons.

I’m so thrilled we pulled this off! It honestly was a ton of work, but very realistic as a DIY if you put in the time. I can actually enjoy laundry now that our clothes have such a beautiful home!